The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale

This is an innovative new study exploring the relationships between developments in the fairy tale and the Victorian periodical press.This title brings together two discrete areas of study (Victorian periodicals and the history of the fairy tale) for the first time. It examines the dynamic role of readers in the evolution of nineteenth-century fantasy. It uses analysis of production and reception contexts to engage with the fairy tale's appropriation in the context of a range of political/historical discourses, including Darwinism, colonialism, feminism, socialism and decadence.

Mark Twain and The Art of Tall Tale

Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is a study of a peculiar American comic strategy and its role in Mark Twain's fiction. Focusing on the writer's experiments with narrative structure, Wonham describes how Twain manipulated conventional approaches to reading and writing by engaging his audience in a series of rhetorical games--the rules of which he adapted from the conventions of tall tale in American oral and written traditions.